Sugar Schools: Cultivating the American Experiment in Territorial Hawaiʻi 1919-1934
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2024
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Public school programming in interwar, territorial Hawaiʻi sits exactly at the confluence of major historical trends in the science of eugenics, progressive education, and the struggle of Anglo-American colonizers to maintain political and economic power. Together the following three forces; race science, colonial pedagogies, and the agricultural industry developed an intimate though often fraught relationship that nonetheless functioned cooperatively to subordinate a non-White multi-racial majority population to White minority rule. This system, henceforth called the Agro-Educational Complex of Territorial Hawaiʻi, was the single most powerful social engineering entity in the islands from the late 19th to mid-20th century. Their project came to fruition from 1919 to 1934 under the guidance of three successive superintendents of the Department of Public Instruction (DPI): Vaughan MacCaughey, Willard Givens and William Crawford, all of whom struggled to resolve what they termed the “Problem of the Rural Schools”. By 1933 they considered Hawaiʻi a success on three fronts: It was a “racial laboratory” where democracy proved its durability, a “racial paradise” where children of all ethnicities learned and worked together, and a “plantation’s paradise” where a race based class and labor system proved resilient enough to ensure the sugar and pineapple industries' financial fortunes.
This work represents the first systematic study of the intimacies of the Agro-Educational complex of Territorial Hawaiʻi as a unified colonial system of control. It provides a valuable foundation for future works on this subject, and raises many important research questions that augur for continued study in the years to come.
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American studies, Americanization, Colonialism, Eugenics, Hawaiʻi Sugar Plantations, History of Education in Hawaiʻi, History of Hawaiʻi
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1 pages
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